"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

February 15, 2013

Tyson's take

The "meteor streaked across the sky and broke up Friday morning over the Ural Mountain city of Chelyabinsk, unleashing a tremendous shock wave that smashed windows, collapsed roofs and injured at least 1,200 people."

I once heard the atrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson give a talk on the heavens, in which he joked that humanity possesses a peculiar delusion of the universe as God's perfectly ordered kaleidoscope of magnificent colors and beautiful nebulae and all manner of wondrously lovely formations, rather than seeing it for what it is--colliding galaxies, exploding stars, nihilistic black holes, and massive meteors hurling toward Earth at 30,000 m.p.h.

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Tyson's take

The "meteor streaked across the sky and broke up Friday morning over the Ural Mountain city of Chelyabinsk, unleashing a tremendous shock wave that smashed windows, collapsed roofs and injured at least 1,200 people."

I once heard the atrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson give a talk on the heavens, in which he joked that humanity possesses a peculiar delusion of the universe as God's perfectly ordered kaleidoscope of magnificent colors and beautiful nebulae and all manner of wondrously lovely formations, rather than seeing it for what it is--colliding galaxies, exploding stars, nihilistic black holes, and massive meteors hurling toward Earth at 30,000 m.p.h.